#mobile_borders

Border Guard Bangladesh director general major general Md Shafeenul Islam on Wednesday said Bangladeshi people were being killed 20 kilometres inside India and he condemned those incidents as ‘killings’ in the name of fighting petty crimes while refusing to accept the conventional category — ‘border killing.’Border Guard Bangladesh chief came up with a new definition at a programme held at the border force headquarters in Peelkhana during the inaugural ceremony of a Data Centre.The BGB chief went on to add, ‘Human life is very important whether it is our citizen or theirs. Our force is cognizant of human rights. No killing is acceptable to us.’‘But the term border killing is a misnomer. It implies that the killing has taken place on the border,’ the BGB chief told the reporters and hastened to ask, ‘Can we term these murders “border killings” when they take place 15 to 20 kilometres inside [Indian] border?’He pointed out to the journalist that a spade should be called a spade and termed every murder as ‘killing.’ He further said that it is killing in the name of fighting ‘petty crimes’.If the killing took place within 200 yards of the border or on the no man’s land it could be termed as border killing, he argued.Asked whether he had any statistics on such killings inside the Indian territory or in areas proximal to the border, he said this year eight Bangladeshis were killed so far.BGB chief took issue with such incidents. ‘Why do members of Indian Border Security Force are killing Bangladeshis instead of arresting them. Bangladeshi people were getting killed when the Indian force were supposed to use non-lethal weapons instead of lethal ones,’ he added.The BSF troops join the rank from various regions across India including Kashmir, and they need more time to become sensitised to the people living near the border areas. They easily become ‘trigger-happy’ when Bangladeshis are involved, said the BGB chief.Last year, he said border killing was reported until October. It increased slightly during the winter.‘Due to the fog in winter, the illegal trespassing usually increases. People cross the border even by cutting the barbed wire fences,’ said BGB chief.He said they have intensified their vigilance along the western frontier so that none can cross the border.‘We are arresting people every day when they set out to cross the border,’ he added.According to the Border Guard chief, they have now a digital surveillance system in place on Putkhali border to check the border crime while another surveillance system was under trial on Tekhnaf border.They have started getting benefits of the surveillance systems, he said, adding, ‘We expect that human trafficking and smuggling will reduce in the border regions.’He said their troops were facing extreme hardship to protect the borders. ‘We can give better protection of borders once we will have border road that are yet to be constructed,’ he said, adding, ‘There are many border outposts which need seven days to reach.’Binoy Krishna Mallik, executive director of Rights Jessore, said it doesn’t matter how far the place of incident is from the border, it is important whether it is related to the border or border forces. These are nothing but border killings,’ he told New Age.As of February 3, 2019, the Indian Border Security Force shot dead seven Bangladeshi in less than five weeks along the Bangladesh-India border.According to Ain o Salish Kendra six Bangladeshis were shot dead by BSF along border in January, four of them on the Thakurgaon frontier and one each on Nilphamari and Rajshahi border.In 2018, ‘trigger-happy’ BSF killed 14 Bangladeshis, according to the Kendra.According to Odhikar, at least 1,144 Bangladeshi were killed by the Indian border force between 2001 and 2018. Bangladesh and India share a border of 2,429 miles.

‘But the term border killing is a misnomer. It implies that the killing has taken place on the border,’ the BGB chief told the reporters and hastened to ask, ‘Can we term these murders “border killings” when they take place 15 to 20 kilometres inside [Indian] border?’

The Real Wall Isn’t at the Border. It’s everywhere, and we’re fighting against the wrong one.

President Trump wants $5.7 billion to build a wall at the southern border of the United States. Nancy Pelosi thinks a wall is “immoral.” The fight over these slats or barriers or bricks shut down the government for more than a month and may do so again if Mr. Trump isn’t satisfied with the way negotiations unfold over the next three weeks.

But let’s be clear: This is a disagreement about symbolism, not policy. Liberals object less to aggressive border security than to the wall’s xenophobic imagery, while the administration openly revels in its political incorrectness. And when this particular episode is over, we’ll still have been fighting about the wrong thing. It’s true that immigrants will keep trying to cross into the United States and that global migration will almost certainly increase in the coming years as climate change makes parts of the planet uninhabitable. But technology and globalization are complicating the idea of what a border is and where it stands.

Not long from now, it won’t make sense to think of the border as a line, a wall or even any kind of imposing vertical structure. Tearing down, or refusing to fund, border walls won’t get anyone very far in the broader pursuit of global justice. The borders of the future won’t be as easy to spot, build or demolish as the wall that Mr. Trump is proposing. That’s because they aren’t just going up around countries — they’re going up around us. And they’re taking away our freedom.

In “The Jungle,” a play about a refugee camp in Calais, France, a Kurdish smuggler named Ali explains that his profession is not responsible for the large numbers of migrants making the dangerous journeys to Europe by sea. “Once, I was the only way a man could ever dream of arriving on your shore,” the smuggler says. But today, migrants can plan out the journeys using their phones. “It is not about this border. It’s the border in here,” Ali says, pointing to his head — “and that is gone, now.”

President Trump is obsessed with his border wall because technology has freed us from the walls in our heads.

For people with means and passports, it’s easy to plot exotic itineraries in a flash and book flights with just a glance at a screen. Social feeds are an endless stream of old faces in new places: a carefree colleague feeding elephants in Thailand; a smug college classmate on a “babymoon” in Tahiti; that awful ex hanging off a cliff in Switzerland; a friend’s parents enjoying retirement in New Zealand.

Likewise, a young person in Sana, Yemen, or Guatemala City might see a sister in Toronto, a neighbor in Phoenix, an aunt in London or a teacher in Berlin, and think that he, too, could start anew. Foreign places are real. Another country is possible.

If you zoom out enough in Google Earth, you’ll see the lines between nations begin to disappear. Eventually, you’ll be left staring at a unified blue planet. You might even experience a hint of what astronauts have called the “overview effect”: the sense that we are all on “Spaceship Earth,” together. “From space I saw Earth — indescribably beautiful with the scars of national boundaries gone,” recalled Muhammed Faris, a Syrian astronaut, after his 1987 mission to space. In 2012, Mr. Faris fled war-torn Syria for Turkey.

One’s freedom of movement used to be largely determined by one’s citizenship, national origin and finances. That’s still the case — but increasingly, people are being categorized not just by the color of their passports or their ability to pay for tickets but also by where they’ve been and what they’ve said in the past.Editors’ PicksMitch McConnell Got Everything He Wanted. But at What Cost?‘A Pumping Conspiracy’: Why Workers Smuggled Breast Pumps Into PrisonThe 20 Best TV Dramas Since ‘The Sopranos’

This is what is happening on that front already:

A 2017 executive order barred people from seven countries, including five with Muslim majorities, from entering the country. An older rule put in place during the Obama administration compelled anyone who’d even just visited seven blacklisted nations to obtain additional clearance before traveling to the United States. Even as the Trump administration’s policy has met with legal challenges, it means that the barrier to entering the United States, for many, begins with their data and passport stamps, and is thousands of miles away from this country.

The Trump administration would also like to make it harder for immigrants who’ve received public assistance to obtain citizenship or permanent residence by redefining what it means to be a “public charge.” If the administration succeeds, it will have moved the border into immigrants’ living rooms, schools and hospital beds.

The walls of the future go beyond one administration’s policies, though. They are growing up all around us, being built by global technology companies that allow for constant surveillance, data harvesting and the alarming collection of biometric information. In 2017, the United States announced it would be storing the social media profiles of immigrants in their permanent file, ostensibly to prevent Twitter-happy terrorists from slipping in. For years, Customs and Border Protection agents have asked travelers about their social media, too.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has said these practices can “chill and deter the free speech and association of immigrants to the United States, as well as the U.S. persons who communicate with them.” In other words, it’s no longer enough to have been born in the right place, at the right time, to the right parents. The trail of bread crumbs you leave could limit your movements.

It’s possible to get a glimpse of where a digital border might lead from China. Look at its continuing experiment with social-credit scoring, where a slip of the tongue or an unpaid debt could one day jeopardize someone’s ability to board a train or apply for a job. When your keystrokes and text messages become embedded in your legal identity, you create a wall around yourself without meaning to.

The Berkeley political theorist Wendy Brown diagnoses the tendency to throw up walls as a classic symptom of a nation-state’s looming impotence in the face of globalization — the flashy sports car of what she calls a “waning sovereignty.” In a recent interview for The Nation, Professor Brown told me that walls fulfill a desire for greater sovereign control in times when the concept of “bounded territory itself is in crisis.” They are signifiers of a “loss of a national ‘we’ and national control — all the things we’ve seen erupt in a huge way.”

Walls are a response to deep existential anxiety, and even if the walls come down, or fail to be built in brick and stone, the world will guarantee us little in the way of freedom, fairness or equality. It makes more sense to think of modern borders as overlapping and concentric circles that change size, shape and texture depending on who — or what — is trying to pass through.Get our weekly newsletter and never miss an Op-Doc

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It’s far too easy to imagine a situation where our freedom of movement still depends entirely on what has happened to us in the past and what kind of information we’re willing to give up in return. Consider the expedited screening process of the Global Entry Program for traveling to the United States. It’s a shortcut — reserved for people who can get it — that doesn’t do away with borders. It just makes them easier to cross, and therefore less visible.

That serves the modern nation-state very well. Because in the end, what are borders supposed to protect us from? The answer used to be other states, empires or sovereigns. But today, relatively few land borders exist to physically fend off a neighboring power, and countries even cooperate to police the borders they share. Modern borders exist to control something else: the movement of people. They control us.

Arivaca is a small, unincorporated community in Pima County, Arizona, around 11 miles north of the Mexican border. The closest big city is Tucson, 60 miles northeast. The town itself is barebones—a smattering of old buildings, some dating back to the 1800s. It is surrounded by swathes of yellow grassland.

To get groceries or cash a check at the bank, residents often have to drive north to Green Valley, or even further, to Tucson. And to do that, they have to pass by a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) checkpoint, where they’re inevitably asked if they’re U.S. citizens.

Recent legal amendments that entered into force on 5 July allow the Hungarian police to automatically push back asylum - seekers who are apprehended within 8 km (5 miles) of the Serbian - Hungarian or Croatian - Hungarian border to the external side of the border fence , without registering their data or allowing them to submit an asylum claim, in a summary procedure lacking the most basic procedural safeguards (e.g. access to an interpreter or legal assistance) .

Spanish authorities are guided by the “operational border concept” consolidated since 2005. Following this concept, the Aliens Act applies only once a third country national has crossed the last of the three fences successfully. While they remain in the land between the fences or climbing the third fence close to Spanish territory, they are considered as not being arrived in Spain, even if they are helped by Spanish agents to get off the third fence. Therefore, the migrants would not be under Spanish jurisdiction and Spanish legislation doesn’t apply. In relation with the ECtHR’s first decision in the case N.D and N.T on 7 July 2015 , Spain amended its Aliens Act in order to legalise the summary returns of those who irregularly cross the border at its enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. The Act on the Protection of Public Security of 30 March 2015 actually established an additional 10th provision to the Aliens Act regulating the aforementioned summary returns (devoluciones en caliente) under the concept of “rejection at the border”, a provision currently examined by the Constitutional Court. This provision states the following:

“1. Foreigners that are detected on the border line of the territorial demarcation of Ceuta or Melilla while trying to cross the border‘s contentive elements (fences) to irregularly cross the border, may be rejected in order to prevent their illegal entry into Spain.

2. In any case, the rejection shall be carried out in accordance with international human rights law and international regime of protection binding for Spain

3. Applications for international protection shall be formalised in the authorised places for that purpose and will be processed according to international protection obligations.”

#Inhumantreatment along #Hungarianborder . Leaqat from Avganistan explains how he was forced to sit on the concrete flow for more than 5 h and #pushedback to Serbia. At the moment more than 300 persons are looking to cross the border while 500 being pushed back only in this month.

With the paradigm shift induced by the 9/11 events, borders have become more mobile and pixelated. One of the first reasons borders are now mobile is that they are no longer limited to the physical boundary line: borders can indeed be both internalized and externalized.